Beppe Madaudo on display in Pietrasanta: matter, memory and suspended figures

From May 3 to June 28, 2026, Art Studio La Marina gallery in Pietrasanta hosts Anteprima, the new solo exhibition of Beppe Madaudo (Giuseppe Madaudo; Palermo, 1950), curated by Diego Ferrante. The exhibition offers a path through some of the most recurrent images in the artist’s research, focusing on the relationship between figuration and matter, presence and fading, memory and transformation. The title of the exhibition does not simply indicate what is yet to come, but rather defines a condition of the image: that suspended phase in which the form has not yet completely fixed itself and remains traversed by traces, tensions and stratifications. It is precisely on this threshold that the work of Madaudo, an artist who for decades has been building a pictorial research based on the sedimentation of matter and the persistence of figures, is located.

The critical text accompanying the exhibition begins with the image of the fish St. Peter, the first work the public finds in the exhibition, depicting the animal linked to one of the best-known Gospel legends. According to tradition, the fish would bear on its side two dark spots corresponding to the marks left by St. Peter’s fingers when he pulled it out of the sea to retrieve from its mouth the coin intended for tribute. That mark, left on the animal’s skin, becomes in the story a memory imprinted in the body, a trace that spans time. In the panel created by Madaudo, the St. Peter fish in fact emerges through a red line that delineates its profile with almost ritualistic precision. Inside the silhouette, however, matter thickens into a surface made of threads, combustions, fragments and superimpositions. The image thus appears inseparable from the traces that constitute it, as if the form could exist only by preserving the signs of its own process of formation.

This process returns in many of the artist’s works. The images are never presented as isolated or definitive figures, but arise through successive accumulations that hint at what precedes their appearance. Animals, human figures and hybrid presences run through the entire exhibition. Horses, felines, fish and bodies recur as persistent elements, but never identical to themselves. In fact, each appearance modifies the meaning of the previous image, preventing these subjects from becoming a mere iconographic repertoire. Rather, in their reiteration a tension is manifested that precedes the symbolic interpretation and directly concerns the strength of the image itself.

The two paintings dedicated to horses constitute one of the most obvious examples of this tension. The works present the same animal silhouette, but on completely different backgrounds: one dominated by ash gray tones, the other built on a deep burnt red. The drawing of the figure does not change; instead, the way the material supports the image and changes its visual weight changes.

In the first horse, the presence seems suspended, almost restrained in an undefined space; in the second, the figure instead acquires density and gravity. Madaudo’s animals appear traversed by restrained postures, compressed colors and eyeless gazes, elements that prevent any direct relationship with the viewer. They do not seek contact or return a glance. Painting preserves this distance and transforms it into an autonomous form of existence.

The figure of theOdalisque also further expands the scope of the artist’s research. The outstretched body emerges through a dense surface of color, on which shapes emerge that recall fragments of landscape or memories without defined origin. The dark head, devoid of features and direction, represents the only point removed from visibility. It is an area of opacity that interrupts the immediacy of the figure and introduces an internal distance to the image itself. In this way, each work seems to guard at least an unreachable portion, a margin that escapes full comprehension and prevents the figure from being completely exhausted in representation. Madaudo’s painting is thus constructed as a space of permanence of the enigma, in which the visible continues to preserve what precedes it.

The Pietrasanta exhibition also allows a rereading of the artistic career of Madaudo, who was born in Palermo in 1950 and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts. His career traverses different visual languages, from comics to painting, always maintaining a strong focus on the narrative and symbolic dimension of the image. In 1975 he published the volume Watanka, a work that earned him the Yellow Kid d’Oro Award as best Italian cartoonist. Parallel to painting he continues to deal with comics and illustration, producing among other things the aquatint etchings for Casanova published by Franco Maria Ricci Editore, the comics De Satyricon for Rizzoli and I Quadri della Divina Commedia for Milan Libri. In the course of his activity he also collaborates with numerous Italian newspapers and publishing entities, including Paese Sera, L’Espresso and Rai.

His painting combines elements of the Western tradition with suggestions from Asian cultures (in fact, Madaudo spent some time in Japan, as evidenced by his 1996 Wrestler , which the public will find in the exhibition), through a distinctive use of color, gold leaf and a dense, layered pictorial material. Madaudo’s works have been featured in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, in cities such as New York, Kyoto and Yokohama. In Anteprima these elements converge in a path that proceeds not by linear narrative, but by appearances and layering. The exhibition set up at Art Studio La Marina thus returns a compact vision of Madaudo’s poetics, highlighting the way in which painting can still become a place of tension between the visible and invisible, between form and matter, between memory and transformation.

Beppe Madaudo on display in Pietrasanta: matter, memory and suspended figures

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.